The home of Rovio and Supercell is never short of gaming startups. "There are three hot categories in Helsinki right now," says Karolina Miller, CMO of Espoo-based accelerator Startup Sauna. "Fintech, virtual reality and obviously gaming, since there are so many startups doing that."

Recent acquisitions show the strength of Helsinki's startups. Fintech startup Holvi was bought by Spanish bank BBVA in March 2016; a little later, Supercell became Europe's first ever "decacorn" after Chinese giant Tencent paid $8.6 billion (£6.5m) for an 84 per cent stake in the company.

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Although investment in the Nordic region is booming - up from $846 million in 2014 to $1.82 billion in 2015 - Helsinki is in danger of falling behind its rivals , attracting only 15.3 per cent of Nordic funding in the second quarter of 2016, the first time it's received less than Norway.

"Finland has remained consistent, but Stockholm has pulled away from Helsinki as the dominant hub," says Neil Murray, founder of The Nordic Web. "It's almost a transitional period for them. They had a couple of big successes, but it's just stalled a little in the last couple of years."

Now they're working on a new business model, known as view-to-play. "The fastest-growing part of the mobile market is mobile video ads," Laes says. "We want to do ads right, not as an afterthought and a nuisance for players."

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Europe's hottest startups 2016: Istanbul

Seriously

More than 35 million people have downloaded Seriously's Best Fiends games, according to CEO Andrew Stalbow. Now the 45-person startup is trying to turn the trilogy into a multimedia brand.

"We're trying to build the 'Pixar of mobile'," says Stalbow, a former Rovio-er and former senior VP of mobile at 20th Century Fox . "That means two new games and the first animated shorts, set inside the Best Fiends universe." Northzone, an early backer of Spotify and Avito, led an $18m series A round in August 2015.

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Europe's hottest startups 2016: Barcelona

Armada Interactive

Most mobile games don't use the platform properly, according to Finnish gaming veteran Samuli Syvähuoko, Armada's founder and CEO. "We're working on a UX innovation that will bring a deeper, more mature and more immersive core gaming experience to mobile," he says. Its real-time gameplay convinced Initial Capital to lead a $3 million round of seed financing in April 2016.

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Europe's 100 hottest startups 2016

ByGreg Williams

Kristoffer Lawson, Javier Reyes and Pekka Nikander are taking on Microsoft, Apple and Google with their wooden pocket computer designed for collaboration and working offline. Founded in 2014 with $1.3 million in seed funding, the company launched its 10cm2device through Kickstarter at a price of €349. There have been delays, but delivery is scheduled for summer 2016.

Smartly.io

Launched in 2013, Kristo Ovaska and Tuomo Riekki's ad-optimisation platform grew revenue seven times in 2015 to €4.3 million and expanded to 75 people, with offices in San Francisco, Berlin and Singapore. It offers A/B testing and predictive budgeting for advertisers, first on Facebook then on Instagram, where it's been an early partner in experiments with clickable ads.

Haanpää says one the first applications is likely to be self-driving cars. "To be widely usable, autonomous vehicles must have the capability to learn by themselves from the data they gather. Unsupervised learning promises to be the key, but first we need to put the science in place."

Umbra3D

Spun off from Hybrid Graphics in 2006, Umbra's graphics-rendering software handles large 3D files for games on everything from PlayStation to PCs. It closed a $3.4 million series A round in October 2015 to fund its work in virtual reality, where it claims it can stream vast, complex 3D scans on to smartphones without any noticeable loss of speed.

Wolt

Launched in 2014, the food-delivery app raised €10 million in April 2016 to expand into Stockholm, with other Nordic and Baltic cities on the horizon. Slush founder Miki Kuusi, 26, its co-founder, is a well-known face on the Helsinki scene, and Wolt's influential backers include Skype founder Niklas Zennström and Ilkka Paananen, CEO of Supercell.

Helsinki's food-delivery startup Wolt expanded into Stockholm this year

Dan Burn-Forti

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MONI

Founded by Basemotion mastermind Antti Pennanen, this fintech startup offers prepaid MasterCards so travellers can pay without charges, and a money-transfer app that allows interest-free loans between friends. Its profile soared in February 2016, when the Finnish immigration service announced it would use it to make payments to some of Finland's 50,000 refugees.

Futurefly

With $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including Arielle Zuckerberg, Futurefly co-founders Oskari Häkkinen and Pietari Päivänen built Rawr Messenger, a gamified chat app released in May 2016. "The plumbing works much the same as in WhatsApp, but you have a 3D avatar you create and communicate through," Häkkinen says. "Interacting feels new."

Click here to explore the other startups on WIRED's 100 hottest European startups list

This article was first published in the October 2016 issue of WIRED magazine